. . . Human Welfare Before That Of Mice, Rabbits, Dogs, Cats

April 25, 1989|By Sara Engram, BALTIMORE EVENING SUN

Priorities. First things first. Clear goals. These are the hallmarks of people who know where they are going and why. In a larger sense, priorities and the principles that govern them define a society.

But you have to wonder about a society's priorities - and its common sense - when fuzzy thinking and extremist actions attract the support of thousands of presumably educated people, along with millions of dollars from their pocketbooks. Sunday began World Lab Animal Liberation Week, a week in which animal rights activists will highlight their goal of halting all laboratory experiments that use animals.

There are plenty of things wrong with that demand. For one, it obscures the distinction between product testing and basic scientific research. That blurring seems to be a deliberate tactic, because it is easier to stir up public outrage at painful tests to determine the safety of mascara than to persuade people to donate money to protest cancer research on mice. By the way, 90 percent or more of the animals used in biomedical research are mice and other rodents.

The protest also disregards the fact that actual ''liberation'' is an experience many lab animals would not survive, and which could conceivably endanger the health of other animals and humans. In August 1987, a group that calls itself the Band of Mercy stole seven miniature pigs and 27 cats from the USDA Animal Parasitology Institute in Beltsville, Md. The cats had been infected with a potentially harmful bacteria. Earlier this month, the Animal Liberation Front claimed credit for the theft of more than 1,000 animals from the University of Arizona at Tucson, including mice infected with cryptosporidium, which poses a potential public health threat.

But the bottom line is this: Without animals, biomedical research will grind to a halt, along with most of the life-saving, life-prolonging and healing advances in medicine.

If such ''ethical'' demands had been imposed on scientists in the past, the chances that you or I would be around to applaud the fact - or be inclined to do so - would be small indeed.

Have you or someone you love ever taken an antibiotic? Were you immunized against polio? Ever received a blood transfusion? Had surgery to correct a defect or repair an injury? Taken a pain reliever?

If moral choices were always easy, our language wouldn't need the word ''dilemma.'' Certainly anyone with any sensitivity or concern for the world and its inhabitants - human or otherwise - should worry about inflicting damage or pain on another creature. But life doesn't allow us clean hands. Each day we make decisions, and very few of them don't involve trade-offs.

Animal research is a prime example.

Animal rights activists say it is categorically wrong to use animals in that way, that animals have an intrinsic value that should not be violated, that human beings who refuse to acknowledge the inherent ''rights'' of animals are guilty of ''speciesism,'' which, in their view, is a crime comparable to racism.

Yet the curious thing is that those people in the front ranks of the animal liberation movement would also include pet ownership as an example of speciesism, a relationship that is inherently unequal and in which the human being assumes dominance over another creature.

Anyone who has ever cared about a pet knows that applying the language of civil rights to such a relationship gets bogged down in hopeless confusion. An untrained dog living in human society can become a menace. That's exactly the kind of dog likely to end up dead in the middle of the road, or dropped off at the local pound.

Likewise, anyone who has ever become attached to a domesticated animal knows that much of this chatter about speciesism demeans the animal and the complex and large-hearted relationship it is capable of sustaining with its human friends.

This society is based on priorities. One of them is that human welfare comes above the welfare of mice, of rabbits and even of dogs and cats. This week is a good time to remember that.